Unemployment is terrible. Whrn you’re out of work for months at a time, and you don’t have an illness or disability that prevents you from getting out, something as simple as an afternoon walk can make the difference between plunging deeper into depression on a day when there seems not much promise of a future, or getting on with life by being out among people. Just seeing that life goes on as normal is sometimes all I needed to feel some sense of hope and optimism. I could pretend that I was not facing, day after day, the very serious void of having no immediate prospects for employment and supporting myself. I was never remotely an entrepreneurial type or one to be self -employed. These were alien concepts to me, and this was in pre-Internet days.
I was reminded of this therapeutic effect of taking walks when in recent years, I ventured on walks to get brief moments of respite from caregiving when I lived downtown taking care of my mother. Charleston has many live oak trees, just like I remember them in New Orleans, on similar historic streets. If it was late winter they were still holding on to the previous season’s leaves in preparation for shedding them in March and April, as they did every year. Shortly after that, the new growth starts in the subtle leafing out of new buds. On the sidewalk might be last year’s remaining leaves, so distinctively small, crisp and hard, but so potent a reminder of New Orleans to me, a city that is literally filled with live oaks. They surrounded my house when I was growing up in suburban Algiers. They were everywhere.
So on these more recent walks, I might also have painfully recalled similar ones I had taken from my brother’s house on Laurel Street in New Orleans, where I lived for a year when I was unemployed in 1989-90. It was only a few blocks from the Mississippi River. I headed up Valmont Street and over to Pitt Street, thence left across Jefferson Avenue and down Octavia Street. I had to look this route up on a map because it’s been 35 years since I’ve walked it, but it was a daily uptown New Orleans routine for me, week after week, and month after month.
Sometimes I’d ride my bike over to Loyola and Tulane universities and enjoy being on the campus, visiting the libraries and university bookstores, etc., and this also gave me a temporary lift, although the busy life of the students sometimes made me feel displaced, considering how little I had to do, and how much time I had to leisurely sit, read and think. One might have thought I was retired or something, and I was only 38.
It was absolutely essential for me to get out like this every day, even if the weather was less than congenial, and to not stay in the house. I needed to look at classified job ads and try to find some kind of part-time job. All this was very depressing. Nothing seemed to be working out for me. All I knew was that sooner or later, I would probably go back to South Carolina.
On those walks, as I headed toward St. Charles Avenue, I made a special effort to notice as many things as I could about my surroundings. In certain states of mind you tend to look at things differently. You don’t take as much for granted. Ordinary objects and things you’ve seen a hundred times before have new meaning and depth simply because you are aware of them once again, and your surroundings have something to say to you as you pass by. But you can’t say anything back. You are an observer. No one notices you. Your walk continues. It’s like you are on a movie set watching the scenes being filmed, take after take, the same action, but with slightly different moods, sensations, and mental states.
I almost dreaded coming home sometimes because those walks were highlights of the day, focal points. I returned to an empty house, but I liked to time it so that it was near supper time and I could go about that comforting ritual of fixing something to eat, perhaps a hamburger and a pot of my homemade mashed potatoes, one of the few things I could prepare well, and perhaps turning on the TV for the first time that day.
The end of the day in those dismal times was a great relief. I could relax most completely then, for I could temporarily forget about the effort it took to feel that I was still a part of this throbbing world of busy, engaged people. I could curl up with a book, take a nap, and watch the night descend, the crickets begin their song, and the neighborhood became a softer, easier place to be in the darkness and quiet of evening. — Sanctuary until I awoke at sunrise with the same mockingbird singing his song. And once again the deep void of unemployment dawned on me.
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